Welcome to 581. See you in class! The syllabus has been posted. Please check here regularly for announcements and updates to lecture notes and problem sets.

01/01/2017

Course setup:

Subject Matter: This course will teach you quantum mechanics at a more advanced level then most student's will have seen in undergraduate quantum mechanics. We will attempt to develop a conceptual understanding of quantum phenomena as well as develop expertise at solving quantum problems. We will cover a number of topics including finding eigenstates using perturbation theory and the variational method, time dependent pertrubation theory and the quantization of EM field, scattering and multiple particles, numerical methods for quantum physics as well as many-body physics.

The heart and soul of this course are the problem sets. It is by doing problems that you will learn quantum mechanics.

Problem sets:

There will be roughly 6~8 problem sets.

They will generally be posted on Tuesday and will be due the next Thursday (9 days later.)

Solutions should be placed in the 581 homework box by 5pm on the due date

(the homework box is located on the north side of Loomis Lab, between rooms 267 and 271 LLP)

For practical reasons late problem sets will not be graded unless a verifiable excuse is given.

For grading purposes your lowest scoring problem set will be dropped

Mathematica, python, or equivalent may be used. Please submit the input/output.

You may discuss the problems with your classmates but each student should provide his/her own solutions.

Please do not use solutions to the problems that might be available online. This is at best bad for your mastery of quantum mechanics and at worst detectable by the TA.

Grading

Problem sets (~ 70%)

Midterm (~15%)

Final (~15%)

Midterm and final exam/project instruction

Midterm: in class on Mar. 13 from 2pm-3:30pm

Final: TBD

Texts: Here are various useful texts. You'll get the best understanding of quantum mechanics by reading through various expositions of the same material.

Shankar (there is a free e-text for this from the library): This is the required text for the course. It's very readable and does a nice job with the mathematical formalism.

Cohen-Tannoudji: This is a great reference and what I learned graduate quantum mechanics out of. It has a great selection of problems (some of which will show up on your problem sets).

Weinberg Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (there is a free e-text for this from the library): This has a really nice exposition of many of the important aspects of quantum mechanics. The only downside is that it eschews Dirac Notation for its own more confusing notation. If you get over this, though, it's ggood to read.

Neilson and Chuang: Quantum Computation: One of the modern areas of quantum mechanics we will cover that is under-covered in typical quantum books is quantum computation. This is a good reference for it.